Something strange happened in a North Carolina court last week. When a grand jury convened to determine whether to indict Raylon Parker for assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill, an unexpected person was one of the jurors: Raylon Parker.http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/...ted/ar-AAizP0q

Are grand juries selected the same way trial juries are? If so I don't know how he wasn't disqualified; it's a pretty obvious conflict of interest. But I guess if he lied during voir dire when asked if there was any reason he couldn't be impartial the prosecutor might not have had any way of knowing.

The grand jury process is pretty much non-adversarial, and a grand jury might be convened for a specific investigation, or there might be a new one convened every 12 months or other interval, to which prosecutors will present evidence and make requests for indictments for that period.

If a grand juror has a serious conflict of interest, they can be excused by the presiding judge, but sometimes, if there is a conflict only as to one matter, they might just be recused as to that matter. The article mentions that the judge decided that the indictment was not defective, but it doesn't mention whether he was removed from the grand jury after the discovery.

I'm currently serving on the grand jury here. We do about 30 cases a day, in the span of about 3 hours, so we usually don't spend much time on any one case. We hear a summary of the facts, and decide if it should genuinely go to trial or if somebody's trying to waste the court's time.

There are 14 of us in the room (plus a foreman) but we only need 12 for a vote, so if a case came up like the OP that person would just abstain from voting. It's very informal, I've seen jurors say things like, "I'm not going to vote on this one because it happened at my apartment complex", and it doesn't even slow us down.